


Prochaines Règles

by nephropsis



Category: Goon (2011)
Genre: Fluff, Getting Together, Multi, Other, Threesomes, mentions of drug use, mentions of unsafe sex, poor personal hygiene, unadulterated tooth-rotting fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-13
Updated: 2017-03-13
Packaged: 2018-10-04 13:09:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,262
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10278941
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nephropsis/pseuds/nephropsis
Summary: It’s been a good month. Xavier hasn’t been in a rush, and he hasn’t been waking up still drunk, and he only smokes half a pack a day now. He’s— he’s been enjoying himself. He’s been enjoying them.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lily (lookingforhoofprints)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lookingforhoofprints/gifts).



> Goon Two is coming out in three days so I wrote blueshoesandbluemountains an alternative sequel just in case. 
> 
> Special thanks to Lily, Lanyon, Donya, Csoru and Ravurian for pre-reading, dealing with vulgarity, and putting up with niche fic for a movie I made at least one of them watch by force.

\- ONE -

The first time they peg him, Xavier maybe cries a little. It’s fine, he thinks. It’s been a long time coming, and it’s definitely a case of a body just having too much in it, all the emotions of several months of confusion leaking out of him the only way it can: wet eyes and an orgasm like the crack of a rifle, the bloom of muzzle flash lighting up the back of his skull.

He’s maybe never been the same since. He might have been, if Doug and Eva had just left after, and he’d had to pick up his own pieces like the usual kind of morning after. Instead Doug strokes his back with one of his huge, scarred-up hands and tells him he’s been good, and fuck it, even Eva pulling out feels like the best thing that ever happened to him. So there’s that.

-

“I’ve got a job offer in Montreal,” Eva says, over the coffee Doug always makes just on the right side of too strong. “I spoke to management to see if there were transfer options. I can move down at the end of the quarter to come onto a new project. They’d pay me more, too.”

“That’s awesome, babe,” Doug says, dropping a kiss on the top of her head before looking expectantly at Xavier. “When are you moving back?”

That’s the thing. It’s always been obvious that Xavier wasn’t going to stay in the minors indefinitely, but the idea of going back to the Canadiens, who saw him melt down like a clay figurine slowly losing shape until he was just an amorphous puddle of fear and cocaine-snot isn’t exactly appealing.

It’s not that he doesn’t want to go back to the NHL, it’s just that he’s been… he’s been himself here. Halifax is a shithole and make no mistake, but it’s a shithole with cheap beer, good hockey and Doug-and-Eva.

The curious combination of the three of them is a mystery he hasn’t solved and doesn’t want to. Solving it would give it form and boundary, and right now they have none of that. They’re just three people who fuck each other sometimes, and maybe Doug has developed this habit of resting a hand on the back of his neck and maybe Eva stands on her tiptoes to kiss him good morning and sometimes gets in the shower with him. Maybe sometimes Xavier asks them to hold him down and screw the bad out of him, and all of it together is the best he’s felt in a long, long time. Ever, maybe.

He’s probably going to ruin it. “When they call me up, I guess,” he mutters into his eggs.

“Won’t be long, bud,” Doug says, blithe and sweet. “You’re playing so good right now.”

He’s right, damn him.

None of them mention that if Eva moves to Montreal too that means Doug’s done with hockey, but Xavier isn’t noble enough to fall on that grenade. He’s done with hookers and blow, but that doesn’t an altruist make any more than getting baptised made him a Catholic.

-

Xavier’s agent dumped him sometime after the second fucktape, when Xavier showed up on yet another website red-eyed and bloodied around the nostrils, conspicuously bare all over.

Sometimes he watches it, just to remind himself that it was really him, deadened to the world and desperate for any kind of sensation to go past the skin. He looks at the scar sweeping his shoulderblade, the faint freckles standing stark on his nose, and he can’t remember what it feels like to be inside that body. The irony of cocaine is that it’s an anaesthetic.

“Did you know that?” Doug asks him earnestly, when he catches Xavier looking at what’s left of his stash, sometime after the end of the season when they’re all thin and tired and ought to be happy off the win. “Dentists used to use it when they pulled out people’s teeth. My dad says it used to be in Coca Cola, which makes sense, I guess. Otherwise why would it be called Coke?”

Doug is recovering slowly from his last game. The other day he opened his left eye, and Eva threw the three of them a party, her feet thrown into Xavier’s lap without permission or resistance.

They drank beer out of those little fairy cups kids have at birthdays. Eva kissed Doug gently, lips lingering at the corner of his mouth, and Xavier looked away.

Eva’s at work when he throws the last of the cocaine away. Doug watches him do it, then throws his arm over Xavier’s shoulders on their ratty couch, heavy and solid and warm.

Xavier thinks about kissing him, and doesn’t.

He knows now that Doug wouldn’t have minded, but it took him a long time to crawl back into his body and stay there. It took a long time for it to feel like it was his again, and not some kind of bizarre, unpredictable torturer, waiting to slam him down with another concussion headache from nowhere. The blow probably didn’t help.

-

Xavier is still a Highlander in the autumn, because nobody can figure out his contract and he still doesn’t have an agent. He just assumes this means he’s going to be in the AHL on a short-term basis, and that when someone takes a bad hit in the majors he’ll get a call from the GM and he’ll have to pack a bag.

It’s different now, though. He catches himself whistling through his teeth as he laces up his skates, and Belchy yells at him to shut the fuck up. The Russians are telling some involved joke about assholes and piss and Xavier is half listening mostly just for the normality of it.

“You look happy,” Doug observes, sitting down next to him. He’s grinning, all his teeth still solid in his mouth somehow, close-cropped beard and close-shaved hair leaving the bones of his face stark, symmetrical and high. Xavier isn’t sure when he started noticing that. “It’s nice when you look happy.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Xavier mutters, but he elbows Doug in the side, because he doesn’t mean it.

Doug smiles quietly and pulls on his pads. He still can’t skate for shit but Xavier is absurdly glad he’s back on the ice anyway. He doesn’t want the A, and never really did.

Doug goes around the logo, even though it’s only the first practice of the season and they don’t have a game for weeks.

-

“Do you want me to teach you to skate?” Xavier asks him, when Doug suggests they go out for a beer and Xavier is too, too glad to say yes, thighs burning from effort in a way they haven’t in a while and something in his chest making a bid for freedom past his ribs. Maybe it’s heartburn. His mother would know.

“I can skate,” Doug says. “I didn’t fall over today, and you did.”

“True, okay, but would you like to get faster? I can teach you.”

Doug looks at him across the booth, eyes wide and face so happy Xavier retroactively wants to kick himself in the kidney for ever being cruel to him. “You’d do that?”

“Sure, whatever,” Xavier mutters into his beer. “Means you can have my back better, right?”

“Yeah,” Doug agrees. “That’s what I’m here for.”

Xavier is about to dispute him when there’s a commotion by the door, and Eva slams into the bar in her work clothes, white shirt and black skirt and terrifying heels Xavier has thought about pressing into the back of his thighs probably more than once and more than he’s proud of. “Vodka and a Moosehead,” she announces to the bar at large, hat slipping sideways off her bangs. “Right the fuck now.”

“Hi Eva!” Doug waves her over.

“You know,” Eva says, crowding into Xavier as she slides into the booth and physically shoves him over, “when you hire someone to engineer something, it’s probably good to listen to them when they say the changes you want to make will flood the entirety of greater Halifax with runoff but what do _I_ know,” she gripes. “We’re all doomed. Get me a drink.”

The bartender comes over with her required items and she kicks her heels off right under the table, stockinged feet shuffling past Xavier’s bony ankles to rest in Doug’s lap. He makes a pleased noise and starts to rub them, completely indifferent to any kind of decorum.

Xavier, who is no stranger to sex in bathrooms, and in this bar’s bathroom specifically, feels his cheeks start to heat alarmingly.

“Hi,” Eva says, relaxing into his shoulder. “How was practice?”

“Xavier got checked and didn’t get injured,” Doug tells her. “And then Belchy…”

Xavier loses the thread of conversation. Eva’s hair smells like wool and cigarettes. It’s silky where it’s catching in his unshaven beard and Xavier wants to curl an arm around her and put his damn feet in Doug’s lap too. His dick is in agreement, even though it’s eight in the evening and he’s still wearing sweatpants from after practice and he hasn’t bothered to shower, figuring he’d just shower in the morning. He hasn’t changed his sheets all winter, so it’s not like it matters.

Maybe it matters.

The thing about Eva is she’s not his type. Xavier’s banged enough Dalhousie undergrads in Halifax to know he’s usually into the girls who are taller than him, the ones with willowy legs and long blonde hair and maybe too much makeup, eyes black-rimmed and nails painted bright colours. Xavier’s into plumage, in a sense, that thing girls do where they get all dressed up just for the fuck of it, Thirsty Thursday as good an excuse as any for a short skirt and a blowjob in the back of a truck.

Doug’s not his type either. His nickname used to be “Flamer” back in Montreal. The aggressiveness of it was par for the course, the normal degree of casual derision for a small guy with an easily reducible name carrying a slightly homophobic connotation, but he’d been good enough to shrug it off, wear it as a mark of pride. He’s not sure he’s ever consciously been aware of this kind of attraction before, the kind where Doug and Eva, each of them on their own and both of them together, stirs a kind of fascination in him deeper than just wondering what it would be like to stick his tongue in their mouths for twenty minutes or so before exchanging a handy.

Eva’s tiny and fierce and funny. She beats Xavier at Call of Duty, and more embarrassingly at NHL 2012. She yells at him to wash his dishes and refuses to touch his ashtrays. She steals drags off his cigarettes and pretends she doesn’t have a pack in her purse. She’s got the alcohol tolerance of a merchant seaman, and once she flicked a pair of discarded panties at his head and told him he’d be better off wearing them than the filthy boxers he’s been slumming around the flat in since the previous Tuesday. He’d dragged the black lace off his face and seriously considered it, stunned at his own mental image of himself.

Eva treats Doug like he’s the best thing that’s ever happened to her. She scratches her nails across the short fuzz of his hair until he’s soft and smiling across her legs on the couch. She kisses him gently in the kitchen early in the mornings and lets him teach her to make latkes and lets him buzz a strip of her hair off, horizontal across the bottom, under the long fall of it. It’s dark brown this month, so they match, her and Doug. His big hands span the entirety of her waist, and her laugh echoes off the bathroom tiles in the morning when Doug goes down on her.

Maybe Xavier has started noticing it. Maybe Xavier has wondered why he wants to get in the middle of that, now, when he’s just started getting his shit together.

Maybe it’s his natural knack for ruining things, like Doug’s team spirit, or his NHL career, or that one pair of socks that’s recently gone stiff, tossed off the side of his bed and relegated to the void of the floor.

-

Xavier is turning twenty-three in early November. For some reason, he’d thought it was common knowledge that it only took a year and a half for his entire life to collapse into a haze of scandal. He’d thought that Doug knew everything about it, given that he was only sent to the Highlanders to babysit him, but when Eva asks him what he wants to do for his birthday, freshly showered and sweet smelling in their foul kitchen, hair wet and pinned up so the shaved strip is visible for Doug to run his fingers over, Doug stares at him intently, brown eyes wide.

“It’s your birthday soon? Why didn’t you tell me? We should ask the team to go bowling or something. Whatever you want. How old will you be?”

“Twenty-three,” Xavier mutters, thinking of the lost year, the games he doesn’t even remember, too hungover or blazed or indifferent to fix in his memory. He probably scored some goals. He probably fucked some girls. He should probably get tested.

“Baby,” Eva announces, poking him in the ribs. “How come you look like a forty-year-old acid casualty then?”

“It’s all the acid,” he snipes back, and she smiles.

“If you want a cake I think the bakery downtown makes good ones,” Doug says. “The place where we had coffee, Eva. The first time.”

Eva smiles at him, gets on her tiptoes and kisses him, and Xavier recuses himself, sure that somehow his obsession is visible from space, a giant beacon of bad intentions and worse history.

He wants to know what it feels like for Eva to curl her fingers in his hair, for Doug to put his hands on his hips. He wants to know what it feels like for Eva when Doug picks her up without even thinking about it, and what it feels like for Doug when he catches them in the living room sometimes, Doug half naked and blissed out, laying in her lap.

Xavier throws himself into hockey because it’s the one thing he’s good at, and he is good at it again, finding a thrill in it for the first time in years. It doesn’t feel like the ice is waiting for his skull anymore, and that’s another gift he has Doug to thank for.

-

November 22nd, Xavier shaves his head. He wakes up the morning of his birthday, stumbles into the bathroom, and sees the clippers still plugged in next to the sink, and experimentally turns them on.

They make an angry buzzing sound, vibration seductive in his hand, so he just goes for it, dragging a stripe right up from his hairline over the crown of his head.

He laughs. He looks ridiculous. He does the rest of it, then his beard, watching the bones of his face come out from under all the hair. He looks his age, grey eyes and black eyebrows all that’s left, shocking against all the pale whiteness of the rest of him.

Doug appears in the bathroom doorway, huge shoulders taking up almost the whole of it. He takes the clippers out of Xavier’s hand and turns them off. “Cool,” he says, running a hand over the soft fuzz left marking out a dark shadow over Xavier’s scalp, and in the mirror Xavier catches his own eyes, low-lidded and obvious. “Happy birthday.”

“Want to win a game tonight?” Xavier manages, choked.

“Sure.” Doug leaves his hand on the top of Xavier’s head.

“Get off me before I get hard,” Xavier blurts, hoping it comes out like a joke.

“Okay.” Doug grimaces a little, taking his hand away, and all the warmth with it. “Would that be bad?”

“I—“

Eva stumbles in wearing one of Doug’s jerseys as a dress, then stops short, staring. “Wow,” she says, stepping slowly closer. Xavier feels like he can hardly breathe, ribs tight under his skin. “Look at you.”

“He looks good,” Doug says, hand still hovering, close enough to the back of Xavier’s neck that he can feel the warmth of it, the potential, the weird electric prickle of his nerves reacting involuntarily.

Eva brushes some of the stray hair off his back, little fingers flicking off the wings of his shoulderblades.

“I— I have to shower,” Xavier croaks.

Doug and Eva exchange a look behind him. Xavier watches them in the mirror, aching at the wordless intimacy of it.

“Can we shower too?” Doug asks. “Like, with you? It’s okay if you don’t want to, but it’s your birthday so if you want to that would be cool. We’d be cool with that. After it’s your birthday, also, but we should probably talk about it.”

Eva laughs and smacks her forehead into Xavier’s bicep before pulling back. “You don’t always leave when you catch us having sex,” Eva explains. “And we don’t always keep it private.”

“Would this be— if it’s just one time, I don’t think—“

“It could be more times,” Doug says, going slightly pink.

Somehow it’s easier to watch it in the mirror. It’s a little as if the glass gives him power, some kind of distance, makes him the kind of person who can look between Eva and Doug and then himself, just to check in, to make sure he’s not about to start a fuck-up spiral all over again and ruin his life just when it’s starting to get good.

“Yeah, okay,” Xavier says.

Doug’s hand lands on the back of his neck, and Xavier leans into it, closes his eyes, shakes out the last of twenty-two with a sigh.

Eva sets the water running and Doug leaves his hand where it is, thumb stroking a slow arc over the curve of skin where Xavier’s neck meets his shoulder.

Xavier feels as though he might be dreaming, or at least he would, if Eva weren’t dragging him into the shower muttering about how if she’d known this was the best way to get him to clean himself they’d have asked him to fuck them months ago.

Maybe she has a point about his personal hygiene, but she’s fucked enough hockey players that she maybe should be used to the smell by now, even if Doug is scrupulously clean.

He’s seen them naked before, but somehow being able to touch is a different story, and the sensation of heat and skin and friction is too much, too good, and so when Doug reaches from behind and closes a fist around him, it takes far less time than Xavier would like before he’s losing it all over Eva’s soft belly.

She laughs, still only barely wet, and presses herself against his front while Doug holds him up from behind, standing on her tiptoes to kiss him.

-

Doug gets up every day at about seven, which Xavier has long considered to be obscene on mornings where they have nowhere to be or nothing to do, which in the AHL is frankly most of them.

Xavier got used to the insanity of an NHL schedule by getting used to Juniors, but eventually the hangovers started becoming too painful to push through, and that was when he got used to hair of the dog. Mostly he skated by in the minors before Doug arrived by being slightly fucked up at all times. It helped that the AHL works slightly differently up here, and he’s not timetabled to within an inch of his life.

Now that he’s detoxed, Xavier has discovered that sleeping needn’t be simply oblivion before the next round of mind-numbing terror, and so Doug’s morning chipperness has taken on a strange dimension of welcome irritation. It’s annoying as hell that he gets up to make Eva breakfast before work and then do sit-ups in front of the TV, but it’s also familiar, a kind of background noise that has become his usual alarm clock.

Xavier bitches about it, but he likes it, too. He likes that he can roll out of bed at 7.15 and there’ll be enough coffee for him to mumble a good morning into, and that they can both kiss Eva goodbye when she heads out the door.

He likes that she kisses him too, and that sometimes after the dishes are done Doug presses him up against the fridge and they make out, maybe, or sometimes Xavier will blow him, just because he feels like it.

They should really talk about it. They’ll get around to it.

-

The thing is, Eva is not a patient person.

“LaFlamme,” she says, on a night in December when they’ve come home from a win, a good one, the kind that makes Xavier remember that he loves this, that going back to the NHL is what he wants, that he has his career, newly revived, to think of. “I’d really like to peg you.”

Xavier chokes on his beer, burn of it going up his nose and out as Doug thunks him on the back.

“What?”

“If you’re not into it that’s cool,” Eva says, looking at Doug and handing Xavier a mostly-clean tissue. “But if you are I’d like to.”

It’s been a month or so. It hasn’t been exactly flying by but he keeps getting stuck on things, on moments that stand out like nails out of plywood: Doug pulling him close and flush and slicking up between his legs, Eva demanding the longest handjob Xavier’s ever given anybody, wrist aching as Doug coaches with a thrilled smile. Giving his first ever blowjob, mouth full and wet and weirdly powerful.

It’s been a good month. Xavier hasn’t been in a rush, and he hasn’t been waking up still drunk, and he only smokes half a pack a day now. He’s— he’s been enjoying himself. He’s been enjoying them.

“Only if Doug’s there too,” he says, and feels like he’s won something when they smile at him.

“Obviously,” Eva says, stealing his beer.

It’s the best thing that’s ever happened to him.

-

Xavier thinks maybe he could do another year in Halifax, if it feels this good to clean up.

The apartment still looks like a hockey bag fucked a prison laundry and smells like mildew and cigarette butts, but they do the dishes now, and throw away the containers after they get takeout.

Doug bleaches the bathroom, probably destroying heirloom mould with generations of history, and stands next to him while Xavier washes his sheets and all his underwear.

Xavier can sort of see his floor now, and when he makes out with Eva on the kitchen counter, he doesn’t worry about sticking his hand up her skirt after touching the surfaces.

He gets tested and comes up okay, and never mentions that it had been on his mind.

And then he gets a call from Coach.

-

Eva is already two beers deep when Xavier meets her downtown at one of the bars she likes that has actual leather on the seats and where there are more drinks on the menu than “beer, some other beer, liquor that might be vodka, but might also be something my buddy made in his shed last winter.”

She’s ordered him a Moosehead and a tequila chaser. She’s never once tried to shame him into drinking less the way other people have, though he supposes part of it is that it would be hypocritical of her to take that tack when he’s seen her pound a forty and carry on with her evening as though it was water.

He downs the tequila first.

“Rough day?” Eva asks, setting her foot against his ankle, hooking her heel in the barstool.

“They’re trading out a couple guys in March and want me back by then to start trying some new lines.” Saying it out loud feels sacrilegious. He croaks it, almost. It’s a good thing. It should be a good thing.

“Uh huh,” Eva says. “It was on Puck Daddy. You okay?” Eva asks, dragging their stools together with her heel, so their knees are bumping. This close she smells like the end of the day, faint lingering tang of smoke and warm fabric and goosedown, the wool of her hat drying on the bar. The noise of the place is a low hum, and it’s the kind of place Xavier has always felt to the left of, even when he was in the NHL and it was normal to end up behind the VIP rope with people falling over themselves to land in his lap.

He can even remember enjoying it, when it still felt permanent and when he still thought he was invincible. When he asked her if she’d meet him after work he had told her to choose the place knowing he wouldn’t be able to have this conversation in the apartment.

“Is Doug going to be mad if… when you said you could move to Montreal—”

Eva kicks him. “Remember how the only reason he came to Halifax in the first place was to watch your skinny ass?”

“It’s not that skinny,” Xavier grumbles. “And now there’s you.”

Eva’s face does something complicated, her hands fluttering for a second above her beer as though she can’t quite choose what to grab. “Look, I told Doug once that he made me want to stop sleeping with a bunch of dudes.” She pauses, leaning in a little closer. She’s older than him, he knows, but he hasn’t really seen it until now, the way her eyes have a fan of smile lines etched faintly into the corners and the way she’s looking at him like he’s being an idiot. “It was totally true. But if both of us like fucking you and you like fucking us, I don’t see what the problem is. Maybe one of us will have to marry him, though. He’s American.”

Xavier takes a gulp of his beer, torn between desperate to kiss her and desperate to fall face first into a pile of powder and come-to four days later, hoping whatever the feeling he’s having that won’t stop wiggling around inside him will just quiet the fuck down.

Eva laughs at him, watching his face, and presses the back of her cold knuckles to his cheekbone, fist loose and gentle. “I’d tell you you’re the first real NHL player I’ve banged but I’d be lying.”

“Last one, though?” He fires back, not meaning it but asking anyway.

“We’ll see.” She taps him gently before she takes her hand away and puts it on his thigh, the casual, easy contact of intimacy. “There’s always the multiverse.”

“The what?”

“Never mind. So I’ll give my notice at work, then, and you and Doug can start making hockey plans.”

They’re really going to do it, he realises. They are really going to pack up Halifax and come down to Montreal just because Xavier is going to go.

He tries to think of another time in his life anyone has done that for him, just put aside practical considerations and decided that he was worth changing for, and can’t.

“How’s your French?” he asks her.

“‘Orrible,” Eva confirms in what might be the worst accent Xavier has ever heard, waving for another beer.

\- TWO -

Eva and Doug make it down in time to watch Xavier lose his first NHL game.

Doug has a brief moment of sadness for the loss, because Xavier likes to win a lot more than he really lets on, and gets really pissy and sad when he loses because he thinks it’s his fault. It usually isn’t, but Doug knows that trying to actually tell him that rarely results in anything but that crappy laugh he does when he doesn’t think what he’s laughing about is funny.

Doug hasn’t considered himself to be retired yet, but watching the Canadiens get rolled over by the Oilers makes him want to dig his skates out of the box they’re packed in and get down there, thump some guys in the teeth just to clear him a path.

“You’ll get them next time,” Doug assures him, meaning it deeply when they pick him up after he’s all done with press. Doug wishes he wasn’t driving, because then he’d be able to maybe pile Xavier into the backseat and kiss the frown off him, but maybe Xavier isn’t in the mood.

He doesn’t say much on the way home, but when Doug pulls into the driveway he sort of shakes like he’s a dog flicking off water, even though his hair has only just started to get long enough to flop into his eyes.

Eva’s been singing along to radio in the front seat. She can’t sing, but Doug thinks she has a great voice anyway, just because she likes it so much.

“Thanks,” Xavier says, when Doug turns the car off and Eva cranes around in her seat to look at him, eyebrows raised expectantly. “Can we order pizza?”

“Sure,” Doug agrees. “We’ll keep the pineapple on your side though, okay?”

Xavier grumbles and gets out, but the hunch of his shoulders is less pronounced, so Doug is happy.

“Heads or tails who gets to make sure he’s not crying in the bath in half an hour,” Eva says, leaning into his side as Doug meanders towards the door in Xavier’s wake.

Doug thinks about it. “I don’t think I want to flip a coin for that,” he explains. “I think maybe we should both make sure he’s okay.”

“Or we can put Celine Dion on and get in with him,” Eva suggests.

“You always have the best ideas,” Doug says. She really does. He loves her so much.

-

When Doug first got together with Eva it felt a little bit like he had a sunrise inside him. Every time he saw her it was as if his insides were trying to get out, too hot and too big all at once, and the first time they had sex she got on top and told him exactly what to do and Doug had never been happier. He’d thought maybe that was what it was like to really fit with someone the way he’d always thought people were supposed to. It was kind of like meeting Pat all over again, except he’s only ever kissed Pat twice and it never felt good like this. He thinks Pat would get it though, if he told him how Eva makes him laugh and makes him feel like he’s enough for her when he hasn’t been enough for anyone but Pat in a while.

Last time he was dating someone it was this girl Hannah who worked behind the bar he was bouncing at and had a big tattoo of a tree on her back and used words like “dialectics” and “teleology” and dumped him when she graduated from school, which was fine with Doug. He wasn’t sure exactly why she liked him, except for when he ate her out, because she taught him how and he was good at it, and that was also fun. He liked being bigger than her, and how much she liked being picked up, but also he didn’t think that she really took him all that seriously when he told her he’d maybe like to do something else one day too.

They haven’t kept in touch, but he kind of wants to send her a thank you card the first time he goes down on Eva and she screams “Jesus fucking CHRIST where did you even learn to do that?” so loudly Xavier bangs on the wall between their bedrooms and yells back in French.

Getting together with Xavier is pretty much totally different from all of that, because Xavier isn’t a girl and isn’t easy to be with the way Eva is. Eva and Doug fit together, sort of, and for a while it feels like maybe it’s weird that he thinks there’s room for Xavier too. At first Doug thinks it’s Friends with a capital F, but then Eva says: “He’s pretty hot when he’s not being a gaping asshole,” and Doug says “I think he’s hot all the time,” without even thinking about it.

“Huh,” Eva had said, after that. “I didn’t know you were into that?”

Doug hadn’t had an answer, except he sort of had. “Sexuality is a spectrum,” he’d said, because it’s something Ira said to him once, and Doug has always liked the way it sounded, like someone didn’t have to be all one thing all the time.

“Would you fuck him, if he was okay with it?”

“I don’t know if he’s okay with it,” Doug had said. “Can I think about it?”

“Yeah,” Eva had said, because she’s the best. “I kind of have to think about it too.”

Later, Doug had called his brother, because somehow talking to Pat about whether it’s weird to want to bang your girlfriend but also your teammate who is also your roommate who is also kind of a jerk sometimes seemed too complicated.

“Doug, are you saying you’re having feelings for this guy? Or do you just think he’s kind of attractive?” Ira had asked, after a long explanation.

“I think— I think maybe it’s sort of both? I want to put my mouth on his mouth even though it feels prickly and weird, and he kind of smells like socks.”

“Well, maybe you should figure out if he’s ready to have that conversation,” Ira had said. “It’s okay, you know. For the record, hockey is super weird.”

Anyway, it had all worked out.

Xavier rents a house in Montreal with the last of his money from when he was in the NHL the first time and Eva’s settled in with her new office and Doug, well, Doug is kind of along for the ride for now, but it’s okay because he was only really into hockey when he had someone to protect in the first place, and now he’s got two.

-

Montreal is kind of great.

Doug and Eva get to go to as many hockey games as they want, and Doug gets to bring Eva lunch at work sometimes and see her all dressed up for it. They go to night games and Xavier gets them seats in the family box, but usually it’s Doug who ends up going when Eva can’t make it. he just doesn’t think Xavier should have to have nobody watching after he got so badly injured, and a part of Doug also wants to be there just in case he has to get back on the ice and punch somebody out again.

It’s someone else’s job now, though, and that feels pretty weird.

The corndogs are free and tasty, and Doug has a pretty good view of the ice for when Xavier scores a goal and looks up before the rest of the team piles on him.

It takes about a month for some faces to become familiar, but when a bunch of girls are in a room Doug doesn’t think it’s polite to interrupt them if they don’t want to talk. It takes him by surprise when a really tall blonde lady catches his eye one afternoon and waves him over.

“I’m Marianne,” she says, sticking out her hand.

“I’m Doug,” Doug says. “Um, are you—“

“LaRochelle’s wife.” She shakes back hard, which is good because Doug is nervous and probably holding on too tight. “You’re LaFlamme’s.”

It doesn’t sound like a question, but Doug doesn’t think it actually works like that. “I’m not his wife?”

Marianne laughs. “No, God, of course not. I just mean you’re… his? I could have phrased that better.”

“I really don’t think that’s how it works,” Doug says, out loud this time. “We played together, and we lived together, and then Eva moved in, and then we moved to Montreal,” he explains. “I’m not playing anymore, though.” Marianne looks back over her shoulder at the group of glamorous women who are watching them. Doug thinks it’s a little like having a crowd behind the boards again, so he waves at them. “Hi, I’m Doug.”

“Would you like to come get drinks with us sometimes? And… Eva too?”

“Oh, sure!” Doug says, relieved. “That would be nice.”

So maybe it’s a weird thing for him to do, but it’s nice having friends who live in town and who he doesn’t have to Skype if he wants to hang out with them. Doug maybe misses having a team, a little bit, so it’s nice that Marianne and Julie and Juliette and Frances and Margot start asking him to come to stuff with them.

Doug is pretty sure it’s weird when they ask him to be in the selfie instead of taking the picture, but it’s also pretty funny when they all have mud masks on and it’s sticking in his beard and Marianne is laughing so hard he can see her fillings. They’re funny. He’s never been friends with this many people before, and Eva likes them too, invites them over and makes margaritas and fits herself in under Xavier’s chin when he looks like he has no idea what to do with his hands, pulling them closed across her belly so Xavier can relax and press his nose into her hair.

“So, how does it work?” Marianne asks, when she’s got her feet up on their coffee table and a big salty glass tipping out of her hand. “Is it just… the three of you? Is he your pet? What?”

“Are you taking bets?” Eva asks, shoving her toes under Doug’s thighs.

Xavier is at an away game with the rest of the team, and Eva’s invited all the girls over to watch on TV and get drunk on their big green couch.

“No!” Marianne gestures, what’s left of her drink sloshing around as Julie and Juliette and Margot turn to listen. “It’s just that he’s—”

“Different!” Margot finishes in her throaty rasp. Doug doesn’t know how to tell her he thinks it sounds nice without making it weird because he knows she’s self-conscious about it.

“Different how?” Eva narrows her eyes in the way Doug knows means trouble. If he’s honest it’s kind of a turn-on, because it’s like she’s about to punch someone. She never does because she’s tiny and Doug would be kind of insulted if she didn’t let him do it for her, but it’s almost the same when she punches people with words.

Margot shrugs, crossing her extra-long legs. “Marcus wouldn’t even begin to know how to hang out with us. Xavier just doesn’t seem like he’s— well, he seems like a good listener. Yeah?”

Eva wiggles her toes under his thigh. It tickles. Doug thinks about it for a while, because Xavier isn’t a good listener at all, except that he really likes it when Doug tells him he’s good at something and he’s really good at asking Eva what she wants now, and obviously he’s much better at listening to coaches now. Eva leans forward and points at the jug of margarita on the table. Doug grabs it for her and fills her glass, then his, then Marianne’s because she’s low.

“Tell me everything,” Eva demands.

Doug listens carefully, because that’s polite, but also he thinks maybe he’s been taking for granted how lucky he is to have two people to love sometimes, because the alternative seems pretty lonely.

Later, when the party’s over and the Canadiens have lost to the Flames, Eva and Doug call Xavier and they listen to each other over the phone for a while, so maybe Marianne was right after all.

“You okay?” Doug asks him, when he’s got Eva settled against his chest and Xavier propped on the screen on the bedside table.

“Yeah, I’m okay,” he says, scrubbing a hand up over his face.

“You played really good tonight,” Doug says, because he did. Eva mumbles a noise of agreement, already half asleep.

Xavier huffs, but he smiles a little, all blue in the backlight. “Thanks.”

Doug really likes the way his accent flattens “th.” He likes a lot of things about him, really. Xavier waves and ends the call, and Doug snuggles in closer to Eva, feeling pretty lucky.

-

Xavier’s roadie lasts two more days and then Doug goes to get him from the airport.

It’s the first time he’s noticed that the rest of the team does the same thing their girlfriends used to do, where they kind of stare in a cluster as Doug gives Xavier a hug. None of them have been as polite as Marianne, though, because none of them have asked him anything about himself.

He used to be really terrible at hugging. Doug thinks maybe he never learned how, which is kind of sad if he takes the time to dwell on it. The great thing about being adopted was that his parents read all those books about making kids feel loved and hugged him and Ira all the time, but he’s never even heard about Xavier’s parents, which might be something he should ask about at some point. Not right now though, because Xavier only grumbles a little when Doug holds him, and even lets Doug carry his bag, which makes Doug feel good.

“Does your team think it’s weird that you have us instead of just one person?” Doug asks him when they’re in the car and Xavier is staring out the window, watching Montreal go by.

“It’s none of their fuckin’ business,” Xavier says, which sounds like something he’d usually say, so Doug doesn’t think that’s too defensive. “Nobody’s asked. They’ve all seen my fucktapes, anyway. Maybe they don’t wanna know.”

“I haven’t seen your fucktapes,” Doug says, not sure if he should be offended or not, but he gets to see Eva fucking Xavier which is probably better, and happens in real life, where he can touch him and hold him still and let him scream a lot.

Xavier grins slyly at him. “I think I’ve gotten better since then.”

“Yeah, probably,” Doug agrees. “You were kind of gross before, and also sort of an asshole. You’re not now, though.”

“I’m not?” Xavier looks surprised.

“Well,” Doug amends. “Maybe sometimes. But it’s usually because you want something and we’re not paying attention to you. You could maybe ask for more.”

“Oh,” Xavier says.

“What do you want to do tonight?” Doug prompts.

Xavier thinks about it, pulling his lip between his teeth as he looks Doug up and down. “Can I finger you?”

Doug’s entire face heats up. “Sure. Sounds good.”

-

Doug is at the pharmacy nearest to their house trying to decide what the difference is between magnum and extra large condoms when someone taps him lightly on the shoulder. He drops both boxes and bends to pick them up, and when he finally remembers to see who’s tapping him he stands face to face with Marianne’s husband, Remy LaRochelle.

“Oh, hi,” he says. He should shake hands but they’re full of condoms. He shoves the box of extra large under his arm and extends a hand. It’s nice when someone can squeeze back as hard as he can, so he doesn’t have to worry about hurting them.

Remy is about Doug’s height and about his width, with bright red hair and three missing teeth. “Doug, yeah?” His accent is like Xavier’s but not as strong. “Marianne’s going on and on about you and… Eva? How are you?”

“Good thank you. How are you?” Doug’s mother raised him right, and that’s the best way to meet someone new. Be polite.

“Fine. Listen, are you— I was here when LaFlamme was a rookie, and that kid was somethin’ else, yeah? It was a hell of a shame what happened to him.” He scratches a hand awkwardly across his chest, looking at the boxes Doug is still juggling.

“Do you know where the lube is?” Doug asks, reminded that he needs that too.

“Uh, no.” LaRochelle paces him as he moves off to find it before he forgets. “Anyway, I can’t speak for the team but I just want you to know, we had no idea he was— like that, I guess? But we've got his back.”

“Like what?” There it is. He grabs the unflavoured kind, because the cherry flavour made all of them gag.

“Like— Well, look, I guess I’d have been a bit more careful with the words if I’d known.”

“Oh, you think he’s gay.” Doug gets it now. “That’s cool. He’s not though, but you should be careful with your words anyway. It’s respectful. My brother’s gay.”

“I— aren’t you both—”

“Not really, but kind of?” He doesn’t think he should be the one to define Xavier for him, when he can do it himself if he wants. “A little bit.”

“Good talk,” LaRochelle says, grabbing something off the shelf, and leaving.

Doug thinks about telling Eva and Xavier when he gets home, but in the end he doesn’t. He does talk to Marianne about it though, because it was nice of Remy to say hello, and he wants her to know he’s also okay with hanging out with her husband sometimes, even if he thinks he likes her a lot more than him.

-

It’s super easy to settle into a rhythm in Montreal. Doug spends a lot of time doing charity stuff with Marianne and Frances and Julie and Juliette and Margot, like going to hospitals to make kids laugh and spending the day at animal shelters and making baskets that are supposed to be for auctions, even though Eva won’t let him make theirs just corn nuts and six different kinds of beer. Doug argues that if people want something that’s from them for some reason this is what they usually give guests, and Eva laughs hard enough that she sprays corn nuts on the rug and Doug has to vacuum.

Then something awesome happens: the Canadiens start winning games, and Xavier stars coming home with a little spring in his step, the kind Doug remembers from when the Highlanders finally started scoring goals again.

Xavier watches his own highlights, and usually Eva will crowd in on the couch too, yelling loudly with the goal horn and punching him in the arm in celebration until Xavier goes red and flustered and Eva starts dragging him off towards the bedroom.

Doug still makes breakfast, and still gets to be the one who sees them both off to work, and still gets to hold Eva up against the bedroom wall and fuck her while Xavier yells pointers and still gets to put his hands in Xavier’s grown-back hair and hold him still the way he likes when he’s blowing Doug and he gets to kiss Eva while Xavier’s going down on her too.

It’s pretty great. He really liked hockey, but what he liked about hockey was the people depending on him for strength and for teamwork and sometimes for punching. Now he’s got two people pretty much all the time, and two people who love each other who love him too, and sure, maybe Xavier gets surly and mean when he’s had a bad day and maybe Eva likes to needle him and maybe Doug thinks that sometimes it would be nice to go back to Boston for a weekend and get drunk on Pat’s couch again for old time’s sake, but it’s pretty great, having a new thing too. He doesn’t really miss the punching except when he watches Xavier’s games and wishes he could be the one knocking teeth out again just to make sure he doesn’t get concussed a third time.

When the weather starts turning warm and the Canadiens are looking at the playoffs, and Xavier is starting to look skinny and elated, Eva insists they stay in bed early on a Sunday morning.

Eva kisses him, then Xavier, slotting herself between them so Doug is the smallest spoon and Xavier is the biggest, even though he’s bony and not curved at all.

“Guys,” Eva says, mumbling into Doug’s shoulder. “I think I’m pregnant.”

\- THREE -

If Eva thought Doug was going to be thrilled about a kid she’d have been right, but her mental image of the process of pregnancy was completely unprepared for how batshit baby-crazy the news makes Xavier.

“We’re expecting a baby,” he tells a reporter. “Ouai, nous sommes à trois mois,” he tells a teammate when Eva and Doug host a barbecue on the patio of Xavier’s stupid, tacky house. “We’re having a baby,” he tells the barista in the cafe by Eva’s office building when he brings her decaf at lunch time. He offers people pictures of the ultrasounds, he tells anyone who asks their list of possible names, and she’s caught him shopping online for baby clothes. He speaks to the bump in French, and sometimes Eva catches him staring at her, a dopey look in his heavy-lidded grey eyes that’s half awe and half terror.

He smiles a lot more these days. He’s got a chipped tooth, the one behind the left canine on the top broken diagonally off at the edge. It’s only visible when he’s grinning.

There’s this thing, though, that Eva also wasn’t ready for: Xavier doesn’t seem to care at all that he’s probably not the biological father.

They fucked bare once, after Xavier shyly announced over mac and cheese that he was clean, that he’d gone to a clinic and checked it out, speaking low into his bowl, accent very thick with nerves.

Eva had been so charmed that she and Doug had taken him to bed immediately, or rather first to the couch and then the bed, and once again after in the shower, but it’s not something they do that often. For someone whose hobby used to be doggy style on pool tables with an audience, Xavier is surprisingly disinterested in it now, which is something Eva wouldn’t have anticipated.

It’s Doug, mostly, who slides inside her, and Xavier who loves to use his fingers, and who shuddered all over for whole minutes after the first time Eva and Doug flipped him over and tried it the other way. Eva knows now the tears were just inevitable, but she and Doug had held him for hours anyway, which at the end of the day is something more totally fundamental to his needs than sex at all.

He didn’t know how to be handled at first, how not to stiffen out of casual touches or to lean into hugs. Eva takes it as a sign of being on the right track that he kept coming back to it anyway, kept letting her drag her nails lightly down his back for no reason, kept coming up to her awkwardly and standing too close so they’d bump shoulders until she put herself in his arms and just let him move around with her.

Fucking him is a joy, but only because he loves it so much, and there’s so much trust in it, and he screams obscenities in French that make Doug laugh and stroke his hair and kiss him silent and make Eva hot and wet all over.

So no, he’s probably not the one who knocked her up, but he’s definitely on board with being a father. Eva thinks maybe she’ll have to start explaining them, their three-in-one deal, to her parents and her friends, but then again, maybe she doesn’t have to. Maybe it’s so left-field that nobody will be able to see anything but roommates.

He doesn’t have a lot of time off and Eva hasn’t taken any yet either, saving it all up for maternity leave. Doug is the one who’s doing the work of getting the house ready, so it’s not wholly unusual to come home after work sometimes and find Doug tapping at his laptop with his tongue sticking out the side of his mouth as he prints sheets on baby-proofing to stick on the fridge, or to find Xavier bouncing around the kitchen in an over-caffeinated daze very early in the morning inspecting paint swatches in various shades of yellow for the spare room and asking Doug which one is least stressful.

The days he does have off they’ve started to spend doing things they won’t be able to once the baby arrives.

Eva should wonder whether that’s normal, three grown people who are mostly functional adults together if not apart spending whole days at the movies, or going around all the idiotic tourist attractions of Montreal and sticking their tongues out at the one or two photographers who always seem to figure out it’s Xavier under all the unwashed beanies and diva sunglasses. She doesn’t. It’s not worth the energy to care, and as she begins to expand, it’s less and less important what other people thing of them.

The first night she feels the baby kick she shrieks and wakes them both up, delighted at the flutter of limbs in there, a little bundle of potential becoming a person slowly, day by day.

“Hi,” Doug says, putting a big, warm hand on her bellybutton. “You probably have fingers today.”

He’s got a chart up on the wall in the office of all the prenatal milestones Xavier keeps asking about. He fills it in with stuff he knows off by heart, like when the heart starts beating and when the foetus develops a respiratory system. It shouldn’t surprise Eva that being the child of two OBGYNs has instilled this kind of knowledge in him, but it’s almost more surprising how blasé Doug is about it. He just knows this shit, like what vitamins to buy and what it means when she spots a little and how not to panic about any of it.

Xavier looks at her for permission before he presses a hand up to the underside of her bump and says something soft and French to the kid-in-potentia that sounds a little more reverent than Eva is prepared for.

“Do you think she can hear me?” he asks them.

“She has ear canals now, so probably,” Doug says, with confidence.

“How do you clowns know it’s a girl?” Eva demands, emotions clamouring for attention mostly in the form of overwhelming joy. “Maybe it’s a boy, we haven’t opened the envelope yet.”

“She’s a girl,” Doug insists. “I can just tell.”

“Okay, Doc,” Eva agrees, grabbing his hand and lacing her fingers in with his.

Normally Eva would insist that being awake in the middle of the night demands at least a little bit of tongue, but tonight she goes back to sleep with hands all over her, warm and happy.

-

Xavier’s second day off in October falls near Halloween when Eva is pushing seven months pregnant.

She dresses up as beer bottle, which makes Doug laugh until he chokes on fun-size candy and Xavier passes him his two-litre bottle of soda. Xavier’s a pirate, eyepatch slipping down his cheek and leaving him lopsided, and Doug has decided to be a ghost, white sheet currently pulled sideways off his head before the trick-or-treaters arrive.

They live in a good neighbourhood somehow, an accidental act of prescience on the part of Xavier’s real estate agent Angelique, and all the kids around flood out the doors to descend in hoards on Halloween to divest the whole street of chocolate.

Last year in Halifax they weren’t ready, and Eva had answered the door in a bathrobe with some jizz on it by accident and stared into the scandalised eyes of six tired parents and eight fascinated under-tens in the hallway of their crappy apartment building.

This year they’ve decorated, or rather, Doug has, going all-out with the lights and the spooky tombstones in the front yard and the BEWARE signs hung on the gates they never close because Xavier lost the clicker right after he moved in.

It’s weird to think they’re treating it as a fun night, Doug and Xavier drinking slowly and chasing each other around the house with their phones to see how can take the best Halloween picture.

The doorbell finally rings when Eva has set herself up in the hall on a lawn chair rescued from the garage and a plastic cauldron of treats in easy reach, but it’s Xavier who makes it to the door first, getting into character a little as he brandishes his deeply unrealistic hook hand at the gathered crowds. The kids shriek in delight and demand their due, which Eva kicks over to him so he can reach, watching him crouch down to talk to them.

If Eva was wondering whether he might get tired of it and disappear into the office like he does sometimes to play video games and jerk off in peace, her doubts are dispelled in an instant. His French is still unintelligible to her, but he keeps it up for hours, sun going down so the lights come out orange on the eaves of the porch.

It’s cold for October, but she’s warm inside the bottle costume, and the baby is kicking hard every time she laughs. Doug makes two runs to the kitchen for more candy because Xavier is giving it out like, well, candy, tossing it in bags by the handful with a grin.

“Having fun?” Doug asks him, scratching a hand up into his hair.

Eva watches him lean back into it with a prickle in his chest that could be heartburn but probably isn’t.

“We never did this when I was a kid,” Xavier says, watching the latest group head back up the driveway. “My parents thought it was stupid.”

“We can do Purim too if you want,” Doug suggests, accepting the snickers Xavier offers him and stuffing it in his mouth in two bites. “Thanks.”

It’s a little bit like being a kid again, for Eva, who grew up right in the middle of five kids, four girls and one boy, downtown Halifax a safe, snowy playground for all the other Navy families on the street. Her mom’s probably already planning an extension to the house for when they come visit, and whichever of her sisters isn’t at sea might come down for the birth. She doesn’t think any of them would tell a kid Halloween is stupid. They’re not going to tell _her_ kid Halloween is stupid.

“Somebody help me up,” she demands, “I have to pee.”

Xavier offers her the plastic hook with a shit-eating grin. Eva throws a jellybean at him, and he catches it in his mouth. Damn his insane reflexes.

“That’s normal,” Doug says. “Your bladder is the size of a walnut now, I think.”

If Eva laughs any harder she’s going to wet herself. She doesn’t, thankfully, but only because Doug hauls her up with alacrity.

-

“We’re going to have to tell her about the fucktapes,” Eva says to Doug while he’s doing the dishes and she’s drying. Xavier is on a road trip again, in California this time, so the time difference is a real bitch. “She should hear it from us.”

"Sometimes... It's good to know that you can make mistakes and still be a good person,” Doug observes, in one of those flashes of profound insight she loves so much. “Nobody’s perfect, right?”

Eva kisses him, feeling him smile against her lips, because she just can’t resist. He’s just so good sometimes, earnest and sweet and kind to the bones. She has no idea how she ended up with someone so willing to be the better person between them, but she knows for a fact that having a baby with him could only ever have been a good thing, even if Xavier wasn’t in the picture. She’s glad he is, but she thinks that without Doug this whole thing would fall apart. He’s the glue, even though he doesn’t seem to know it. He’s the good one between the three of them.

"Do you think she's going to be Jewish?” Doug muses.

“I don’t know,” Eva answers. She’s never thought about it. Xavier has a cross he pretends he doesn’t care about in the room where he keeps his stuff but he never goes to church, and Eva doesn’t think she can remember the last time she did. “Do you want her to be?”

“I’ll think about it,” Doug announces, handing her a plate to dry. “What do you want to do tonight?”

Eva wants to ride him until she screams, and says so, so that’s exactly what they do, Doug holding her steady by the hips and grinning up at her over the mountain of her belly.

-

Most of their conversations happen in bed these days, because Eva is increasingly disinterested in being on her feet.

She finally takes a day off on Wednesday when Xavier has a home game, so when he comes back to nap before the evening puck drop he slides in with her and wraps himself around her the way she has grown to love, bony hips sharp under his sweatpants and three-day beard ticking the back of her neck.

“Where’s Doug?” he asks, yawning.

“Marianne took him for pedicures,” Eva says. “He sent me a snapchat.”

Xavier mumbles something French in the general direction of her belly. Eva catches “ton père” and something about feet. She grabs his hand and puts it on the side of the mound, his calluses dragging pleasantly over the drum-tight swell.

It’s silent, for the most part, save for the creak of the bedsprings and the faint whistle of wind over the window frame. He breathes more quietly now that he doesn’t smoke anymore and hasn’t put anything up his nose in over a year.

“Does your family know?” she asks, unsure why now, when she’s had months to bring it up. Maybe because she feels like she’ll split open more and more by the day, and is so ready to bring the baby out into the world that she’s almost impatient for it.

His forehead presses into her shoulder. She feels him shake his head. “They don’t read the gossip, and I haven’t— we don’t talk much. My dad is at a conference in Berlin this week, I think. Maman always has court dates, so.”

It seems strange to Eva that they’re only just on the other side of town, Professor and Madame LaFlamme, PhD and Advocat. They’ve never come over, even if Xavier has lunch with his mother sometimes near the Crown Court and always comes back a little off.

His dad has a Wikipedia page for some theorem he’s contributed to. Eva wanted to know about her mystery in-laws, the ones that are even more distant than Dr. and Dr. Glatt, who are mostly just confused by her. It doesn’t help that she met them drunk the first time, and then when Doug was in the hospital the second, but she thinks they’ve warmed up to her. She hopes Ira will come up from Boston when the baby’s born.

“Do you want to tell them?”

“Yeah,” Xavier says. “Yeah, when she’s born, and they can meet her.”

Eva wriggles closer to him, sore all over no matter what position she takes. “Hey, will you rub my shoulders?” She phrases it as a question, just in case he doesn’t want to, but he does, rearranging his limbs so he’s got a good angle on her neck and spine, thumbs digging in just where they ought to go. It feels great and Eva tells him so, catching the short pause as he absorbs the praise before starting again.

He manages about ten minutes of it before he’s asleep, mouth open and knees tucked up under hers.

Doug comes back before Xavier’s alarm goes off and slides in on the other side, exaggeratedly careful. He smells like nail polish and hairspray and looks dopey as hell, watching her in the twilight. “There’s gonna be four of us soon,” he whispers, smiling so widely his eyes almost disappear into his cheeks.

“I can’t wait to not be the size of a blimp,” Eva gripes. “I miss beer. Nine months without beer, Doug. We can’t even fuck properly anymore, I’m worried we’ll scar her.”

“Actually, having sex in the last trimester is—”

“Tabarnak,” Xavier mumbles. “Some of us are asleep.”

“Hi Xavier,” Doug says, waving at him. “Do you want a ride to the game?”

“Fine,” he agrees, rolling over onto his other side. “Ten more minutes.”

“Sleep while you can,” Eva warns them. “There’s going to be a lot of screaming soon.”

She can’t wait. Pregnancy is kind of drag, except for how they’re going to have a baby. A real one. Shit.

-

Eva is in the middle of a quarterly meeting when something bizarre happens. The baby does what feels like a barrel roll, thumps her twice in the side and then goes totally still. Eva stops talking about supply-chain management mid-sentence, looks down at her belly and manages to witness her water breaking all over her shoes.

“Oh shit, you’re early.”

“Um, Eva,” Noor raises her hand. “Do you need to go to the hospital?”

“Yeah, probably.” Eva sits down just as the first contraction hits like a wave, ripples of pain spreading into an overwhelming crush of involuntary spasm. “Shit, shit, somebody call— Doug.” Xavier has an afternoon game, today of all days, and Eva was going to order Thai food and watch him and Doug make out after. She’s not due for two weeks. She’s already got plans tonight. “Actually, just give me my phone.”

A second contraction hits just as she’s texting Xavier. It’s way too soon. “Hey, who knows what the fuck goes on when people have babies?” she yells to the office at large.

“Did you have contractions earlier?” Noor asks, tucking her scarf tighter and rolling up her sleeves.

“I thought it was gas. I had chili for breakfast.”

“And you came to work?” Noor looks exasperated. “Okay, screw a car, someone call an ambulance,” she says.

Normally, Eva would rail at not being in charge of this, but the muscles under her skin are starting to quiver again, waiting for the next push, and suddenly she just wants to be in the hospital, and wants Doug and Xavier to show up, like magic, the instant she wishes for them.

Doug picks up his phone on the third ring. “Eva, you’ll never guess how many puppies are here,” he says. In the background there’s barking, and the little yips of baby animals. He loves the adoption open days. “Is everything okay?”

“Time to go to the hospital. Someone’s on her way.”

“Oh,” Doug says, then: “Oh! The baby!”

Eva’s still laughing when the ambulance arrives.

Doug shows up when she’s already on the table, ignominiously stripped and ready to go, the nurses clustering around the midwife and waiting on the doctor.

Eva feels sweaty and over-full and exposed, and Doug shows up wearing a suit and carrying flowers. Eva would laugh if she wasn’t in a ludicrous about of pain and currently trying to hold in a baby for long enough for the doctor to show the fuck and make sure nothing is seriously wrong. “Get over here!” She probably shouldn’t yell at him but he dumps the flowers on a nurse and does. She clamps down on his hand like she’s trying to break his fingers, but it’s Doug so he just squeezes back.

Things start to get a little blurry when the doctor shows up and gives her some drugs, so she’s not sure how long it takes for Xavier to burst into the room, but that’s the only word for it; he erupts through the doors wearing leggings and under-armour, steaming faintly from the cold outside and the overwhelming heat of recently-shed padding.

Eva can’t smell anything but blood and Doug and hospital, but all his hair is plastered down with sweat and he’s yelling in French, and then Eva is yelling at him to stop yelling and then Xavier is scraping her hair back off her forehead, terror narrowing his pupils to tiny pinpricks. He drips sweat on her while the midwife tells her to push, and then—

and then there’s a baby.

-

The photo Doug posts to Instagram of the four of them ends up in a frame on the wall.

In it, Xavier is holding Fleur, crowded into the bed with Eva in all his drenched thermals, looking like a dumpster raccoon given human form and an infant. He’s so transfixed by her that he isn’t even looking at the camera where Doug is holding it at arm’s length, face next to Eva’s. Her bangs are clumped and scraggly and she looks exhausted. The hospital bed isn’t big enough for three of them, so Doug is leaning awkwardly into the frame, angling the lens so Fleur’s little slimy red potato face is visible.

Eva thinks it’s the best thing she’s ever seen.

\- Epilogue -

Xavier takes them to a family skate when Fleur is starting to toddle around.

Eva has collected a startling amount of pictures of Xavier and Doug carrying her around in a Habs coloured baby sling donated as a gift by Marianne and Remy, and Xavier may or may not have insisted on setting her up with a tiny version of his jersey with her name —Eva’s name— on the back. It hadn’t seemed fair in the slightest to name her Glatt, not when Fleur is going to have the dad equivalent of a double-double forever as far as they’re concerned.

It’s also kind of nice to see “Prendergast” on an NHL uniform.

Xavier laces up her skates and sets her on the ice between his legs and takes off, oblivious to the photographers and the defensive position taken up by Margot and Marianne, clustered around Doug with their own kids.

Doug’s taken on fatherhood like it’s the last period in the playoffs.

He was up all night with Fleur every time she cried and learned to get the milk to exactly the right temperature with minimal fuss, and frankly Eva is glad one of them was on top of that because all she wanted to do for two weeks after giving birth was sleep for twenty-four hours a day.

Xavier still had to play hockey, so he only got up once or twice a night, and for the most part it worked. It still works so well it’s a little scary.

Now when Eva gropes her way towards wakefulness she’s as likely to find Doug and Xavier with their heads together over Fleur’s weird babbling as she used to be to find them making out in the shower. Doug takes her out while Eva goes to work, and Xavier comes home and takes her out of Doug’s arms and prompts her to nap against his chest and every impulse Eva might have had to try for a less completely codependent arrangement has gone flying neatly and promptly out the window.

Xavier has never said a word to her in English no matter how much Eva half-heartedly complains about them having a secret language.

Eva skates a lazy circle around the rink and bumps up against Doug, hooking her elbow in with his and waving a quick hello to his friends. Margot cracks her gum and smiles back. “Your little one is getting on the ice quick,” she says. “Happy about it?”

“Yeah,” Eva confesses. “I fucking love hockey.”

“She does,” Doug agrees, looping a big arm across her shoulders.

“More power to you.” Marianne butts in, keeping an eye on her three boys now yelling at the far end of the rink with half the defensemen. “Hope you’re ready for a lifetime of it.”

Xavier skids over with a spray of ice, Fleur on his shoulders shrieking in delight. “I think she likes it,” he says, swinging her off by the arms and pretending to throw her at Doug, who never fails to take it completely seriously and set himself up to catch.

Fleur screeches and reaches for Doug’s wrists, and Eva watches as Doug takes her carefully out of Xavier’s arms, and the way Fleur octopuses into his chest with all her little malcoordinated limbs. It’s still not a sensation entirely unlike heartburn.

Xavier looks at Eva as though he knows exactly what she’s thinking.

He probably doesn’t know that she wants to thank him for being a colossal tool for just long enough to keep Doug in Halifax for them, and for making this shit work even though it shouldn’t. He can probably guess the other thing though, if the way he smirks down at his skates is any indication.

“Wanna get out of here?” She asks them both.

Doug swings Fleur around in a big circle, to her immense delight. She’ll be exhausted in an hour.

“So we can have sex?” Doug sets Fleur back in his arms, where she promptly buries her face in his shirt. “Yeah, okay.”

Xavier laughs quietly, and Eva socks him in the arm. “Obviously.”

It shouldn’t work. It does. It’s like a perfect punch, right to the heart. The pegging is really just a bonus.

**Author's Note:**

> See you all in hockey hell, where I live now, or just on tumblr [here.](http://febricant.tumblr.com)


End file.
